For admins/moderators, the ability to have a "meta" site (or just a "meta" section in the same site) for discussing moderator-only issues might be more effective than a PM system which is inherently 1:1 rather than group-wise. Or a private chat room, per Rich's answer below.

Since the development cost of implementing it only for "superusers/moderators" is the same of implementing it for everybody, I suggest leaving this as a decision for the every OSQA site admin (through a couple of settings).

I believe this is a very important feature for fostering community. Otherwise, a lot of people will not even be able to get in touch with each other, if they so choose. Can you imagine the feeling of being on a Q&A site, and wanting to get in touch with other users (maybe to start a new project together, or whatever?), and you can't even do that? There's just a wall of silence?

In general I don't think private messages are a great idea as there is a tendency for them to fragment the site as detailed discussion happens in the PMs rather than comments and answers, so a lot of useful information is hidden from others. There are already a number of ways for users to find each other if they choose. For example by putting your credentials in your user profile. The main use of a messaging system in my opinion would be as a means for moderators to discuss posts and wotnot in private, even then it might be better to have a group chat system rather than 1-1 PMs.

My account is attached to my facebook, if you want to chat, find me there. Otherwise find me in the osqa chatrooms. I think internal messaging is sort of out of the scope. It might be a nice feature eventually, but I don't hold it as a pri.

I would also agree that this feature is very important. In a fully public environment, having a PM feature allows someone to get in touch with me without my having to reveal information like an email address, IM screen name, etc. That degree of indirection increases comfort in some situations (it's the same reason I like PayPal). I know the dev team is working on controls to prevent spamming (Akismet, etc.) where possible, but the fewer places my contact info is publicly available, the less time I have to spend teaching my spam filter that all eleventy billion spellings of the word Viagra should be blocked. On the other hand, if you were deploying OSQA in a corporate environment, having that PM feature is a nice way to segregate communication related to your OSQA site from the constant stream of stuff coming into your inbox (even if you receive an email message every time you receive a PM). From a development perspective, I don't see this as being a major challenge. I think django-messages (part of Pinax, I believe) has virtually all the functionality you'd want in a PM system. I played around with django-messages and a much earlier version of OSQA about a month and a half ago and it didn't take much time to get it semi-functional. When you all get around to updating your module creation documentation, I'd love to take another crack at adding it.

Your answer

Hint: You can notify a user about this post by typing @username

Attachments:
Up to 2 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 524.3 kB each and 1.0 MB total.

AnswerHub Docs Site

If you're looking for documentation, check out our documentation library. This collection will help all types of users perform a wide range of actions and gain a better understanding of the AnswerHub platform.